Can the Courts Define Science?

Last December, the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania against the Dover Area School District that was considering adding intelligent design material to the curriculum.  The lawsuit attempts to define intelligent design as “inherently religious” and therefore unacceptable in science classrooms.  The move appears aimed at censoring books from the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) which publishes student materials on intelligent design and critiques of evolution.  If these tangible assets at the center of the controversy over the teaching of evolution are ruled inherently religious – even though they teach no religious doctrines but only scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory and design detection methods – then science students would only have pro-naturalistic textbooks available to them.
    The Alliance Defense Fund has filed a motion to intervene on behalf of FTE.  ADF-allied attorney Jeff Mateer remarked, “The ACLU and their allies are using the courts to further the preposterous notion that no other theories [than evolution] on the origins of life are scientific.”

To the liberal left, free speech is the highest ideal, and censorship is arguably the worst crime in the world.  So who are the censors here?  Who are the book-burners here?  Who are the ones for indoctrination, against the open marketplace of ideas, and for stifling debate here?  The very groups that want to defend homosexual advocacy and Islamic religion in public schools, believing that even grade schoolers and kindergartners should be exposed to it, exhibit rank hypocrisy when it comes to anything not on their leftist agenda.
    This is another egregious case of far-left liberals running to the courts to do an end-run around the voice of the people and their elected representatives.  It’s not just critics of Darwinism that should be outraged.  If the courts can define what science is, then Big Science itself should tremble.
    If the ACLU succeeds, we suggest they be consistent.  No more computer science in public schools, because it is a science based on intelligent design.  No more mention of SETI.  No archaeology.  No information theory.  No cryptography.  No forensics.  No mention of molecular machines or cellular networks (see 03/14/2005)  No teaching on DNA as a genetic “code” or “language”.  Since these sciences use design words, which might imply intelligent design, they are inherently religious.  While they’re at it, maybe they should exclude all mention of Kepler, Newton, Herschel, Faraday, Maxwell and any other scientist who was a Christian or creationist (see online book).
    If intelligent design is religious, then so is Darwinian evolution and the philosophical naturalism that underlies it.  The ACLU is not trying to keep science classrooms free of religion.  They just want it free of everyone else’s but theirs.  They want to keep biology classrooms safe for the Cult of Tinkerbell (03/11/2005 commentary), so that Pope Charlie (02/13/2004) won’t get a stomach ache (11/29/2004) when clever students discover problems with his fairy tales.